New Study Says Parents Trust ChatGPT for Health Advice Over Doctors

Research from the University of Kansas Life Span Institute found that parents seeking health care information online for their children trust artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT more than health care professionals. They also rated AI-generated text as credible, moral, and trustworthy.

Recognizing that parents often turn to the internet for advice, the researchers wanted to understand what using ChatGPT would look like and how parents were interpreting it, says Calissa Leslie-Miller, MS, a doctoral student in clinical child psychology at the University of Kansas and lead author of the study. 

Leslie-Miller and her team conducted a study with 116 parents, aged 18 to 65. The parents were given health-related texts with topics like infant sleep training and nutrition. Participants reviewed content generated by ChatGPT and health care professionals and were not told who wrote it.

"Participants found minimal distinctions between vignettes written by experts and those generated by prompt-engineered ChatGPT," says Leslie-Miller. "When vignettes were statistically significantly different, ChatGPT was rated as more trustworthy, accurate, and reliable."

Leave a Comment